1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to fluid ejecting apparatuses and cleaning methods for such fluid ejecting apparatuses.
2. Related Art
Ink jet printers have been widely known for some time as fluid ejecting apparatuses that eject a fluid onto a medium. Such printers carry out processes for printing onto a medium by ejecting ink (a fluid) from nozzles formed in a fluid ejecting head.
In such printers, there have been occurrences of missing dots in printed images, which are caused by attempting to eject ink in a state in which bubbles have entered into a nozzle and the nozzle thus experiences blank ejections. There are printers that execute a cleaning process in which ink is discharged along with the bubbles within the nozzle in order to suppress the occurrence of printing problems caused by missing dots (for example, see JP-A-2007-152725).
Such a cleaning process consumes a large amount of ink in order to discharge the bubbles, and thus in JP-A-2007-152725, the amount of ink supplied is changed depending on the severity of the printing problem. Nevertheless, a significant amount of ink is still consumed by this cleaning process, and thus the further reduction of the amount of ink consumed is still an issue.